Charlie was a high school junior in the middle of a very, very busy stretch in his academic life during the spring of his junior year. On top of this, he was planning to take college entrance exams (SATs), and he participated in sports in the spring and winter seasons. This all but insured that he did not have a lot of free time. He was taking AP world history and honors English, and the rest of his courses were college prep level courses. (This issue was a little bit like Sarah’s, as they simply didn’t have enough hours in the day.)

Again, the solution was multifaceted. We implemented several strategies all at once, combining outlining, note-taking, and test prep techniques, as well as chunking, blocking and time management protocols, and homework tracking and time prioritization. Charlie got the whole buffet of services! The main thing that helped him tremendously was breaking up his work into daily, manageable chunks that he was able to keep up with. The mentality was to prepare as if he was prepping for a test the next day, based on the information to date with his subjects. If he didn’t have a test for six or seven days, he would study about 1/6 of that material as well as all the material up to date to that point he found this extremely helpfulbut . Not only was it helpful, but it was also actually more efficient. He was able to spend less time studying than he had before because he was able to use his time more effectively. Later he confided that he felt the time management calendaring was most useful because he basically understood the topics, he just wasn’t able to plan things out so that things didn’t start overlapping with each other and become confusing and overwhelming.